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Innovators, geek tricksters, obsessive-perfectionists, un-serious, electronic-rock geniuses? Time will tell, yet The Legend of the Black Shawarma, Infected Mushroom’s 7th album release will surely grab the chair from beneath you and leave you thinking- I’m not sure what was this meticulous musical chaos, but I can’t stop moving even after the track has finished. Hailing from sunny shores of Israel, now based in another sunny city, Los Angeles, the sun always seems to shine in Infected land, the core of which is Erez Eisen and Amit Duvedevani. But seriously, amongst the hard-earned success, the mess, the nuclear shows, the private jokes you will find two very do-it-yourself kind of musician scientists who write, produce, mix, master, finetune and fix closely each detail of their music. Part 1: “It’s always changing, you know” AF: Can you speedily present the band? Who’s doing what? Eisen: We started- my collaborator Amit Duvedevani, known as Duvdev, and I, Erez Eisen, in 1996 doing a great deal of horrid music. Now today we are like a big band you know, not so big, but we have a drummer named Rogerio Jardim he’s a great drummer from Brazil, he lives in America now. We have an Israeli guitar player Erez Netz, which is considered one of the best electronic guitar players, the best in Israel. We love him. And also Thomas Cunningham, a young kick ass guitar player from America who performs with us. This is Infected Mushroom. AF: What do you consider to be your influences? You’re using numerous ‘metal’ gigs and numerous ‘jazzy organs’ on the same tracks, a good deal of hip-hop influences, some Spanish music influences… Eisen: It’s always changing, you know. It started with electronic like Psytrance bands, which is Simon Posford, known as Shpongle as well, likewise Hallucinogen. At the time we liked X-Dream, Etnica, numerous other bands from this genre. These are the main ones. And tardily through the years we became open to everything. We are listening to radio and MTV, not as it is today, horrible, but how it used to be with more heavy metal stuff. Even if it is hip-hop sometimes, a few Jay Zee tracks, it may be nice. Maybe we don’t like the whole conception but we like a good deal of ideas. We try to just have fun in the studio fundamentally and to be as originative as we can. AF: Your style has changed a lot in the past few years. When you go back to your old tracks and you listen to them, what are your thoughts? Eisen: The Gathering, which is the primary album as Infected, I tend to think that is has a few decent tracks for me. I think Tommy the Bat is one of them, and a few others, but the production is horrible. I’m not so proud of it, let’s say. But, you know, I was 16 I think when we did it. So it’s OK. AF: Do you commence making a song in your studio or occasionally you need to go to someplace else to get inspired? Eisen: No, it’s always in the studio. We tried doing tracks on the road, but we never did one. Sometimes we come with just no ideas into the studio and we just determine on a BPM, normally it’s just 145, and we just begin kick, bass line, and someways looking for sounds and stuff. Sometimes we are lucky, everything goes with no problems or difficulties and we have a track going on very fast, and at times we get stuck like a week on a track. AF: I recognise what you mean. I have been stuck for 10 years now. Eisen: When we are stuck, I wanted to kick myself sometimes, I wanted to say “that’s it, I can not do anymore music, I have no more ideas”, but then Duvdev said “let’s see it as a fight in the studio”, like a video game- there is a level that is actually hard to pass, and you keep attempting until you move to the next level. So this is how we see it these days and it in truth helps. For us, when we have these horrid days we just give it a fight. Sometimes it’s the lyrics. Duvdev comes in with lyrics, and from there we get something- which is much easier. Every time it’s something different. AF: What would you consider to be your biggest challenge as a band? Eisen: We always have challenges. I guess the introductory big challenge was to make the band happen, to find the guitar player, to find the drummer, to write the parts for them, because the tracks are already kind of busy for us, and we didn’t want to make it noisy for the live show. It’s kind of hard, in the beginning, to think regarding what the guitar player would play that will not sound too busy, and how to add a drummer that will not give rise to too much of a mess. AF: In the studio you may formulate and construct music beneath idealisti conditions. It then becomes a challenge to re-create that sound on stage. How do you approach that? Eisen: Yeah, for stage we undertake to have a little bit more bass, this sentiment that you have a huge speaker and you want to feel the bass, not just listen it. This is very important. And for the rest of the frequencies we try to make it as good as we may equated to what we had in mind in the studio- which never happens, by the way. With our luck, we go to horrid sound schemes most of the time. It’s always a challenge to do a proper sound check. Part 2: “I hate compression”: Gear and Sound Design Technique AF: I see that you have a Blue Microphone, how did you choose this one? Eisen: We have two Blue mics and a Blue Bottle. When we were in Israel, we had a lot of luck finding a guy that had all these old school mics, including the high end Neumann and particular Telefunken. Very good mics. The way I learned that I have to do tests is, I call it the blind test. You record WAV files and then you just choose whichever sounds best. No matter what it is, you have to go with it. So we tested let’s say 5 mics, and the Blue sounded the best for us – in everything. AF: Seems to be a good way to choose. Eisen: This is always what we do. Sadly, we most times find out that we spend cash on, for example, highpriced compressors, and at the end we find that a plug-in sounded better. Which is annoying, but if it sounds better, it sounds better. AF: I see that you have an Avalon pre-amp. How do you commonly use it on person instruments, like on guitars, synths? Eisen: The Avalon pre-amp we use for synths, so we plug a great deal of synths to the Avalon – it just sounds so much better than connecting it directly, of course with unbalanced cables. We use it also for guitar recordings. It’s the same as the synths basically, I am just connecting the output to the Zoom effects processor for guitars. AF: The G7? Eisen: In the studio we use the G9 actually. It’s the same, almost the same. We connect it directly to that and it sounds great. The only negative thing I have to say with regards to it is that it gets distorted beauteous fast. Unlike the Neve 1073. But it still sounds good. If it’s not distorted, it sounds genuinely in truth good. AF: I’ve seen pictures of your home studio 6 or 7 years ago and now you have larger one in L.A., but you still use the Dynaudio BM6A. I have the same pair for 7 years as well. They are good but kind of aggressive in the high pitched sounds. You never wanted to upgrade to another kind of speaker? Eisen: The thing is we had a large total of monitors in the past, and again, we likewise had the Dynaudio BM15 and likewise the… I don’t do not forget the model, it has two woofers and one tweeter, it’s genuinely pricey like $6000. We said let’s try, and it didn’t sound as good. The mix didn’t come out as good as we had on the BM6A. So we said fuck it, it sounds good enough. Maybe we are going to change in the future, I recognise there are a few monitors which are supposed to sound much better for mixing, like the Adam I heard good stuff about. AF: And you are employed to these ones, so your ears recognise perfectly how they work… Eisen: We’ve used them for so numerous years. I may throw these speakers into almost any room and get a decent mix. AF: Do you have a second pair for mixing? Eisen: No. I hate this system. We employed to try that as well, it just confuses me. I can not mix like that. AF: What compressor or limiter do you use on the final mixes? Because your tracks don’t sound so compressed equated to other electronic music songs. Eisen: We don’t use compression at all in the final mix. AF: Ok. Interesting. Eisen: I mean, this is our- let’s say- our secret. Big secret. We do the mastering ourselves as well. We basically learned that if we push the gain genuinely high and get everything distorted in a way that you don’t listen distortion, you just see the red actually actually – say 6db+ you don’t listen distortion yet and we record that analog to another convertor then we get much better sound. We tried even the Waves Ultramaximizer- I don’t find them sounding better than what we do. I find the Waves, for example, taking away the highs a little bit. And not only Waves, a lot of other companies that do the same things. The highs always go away, and something in the details goes away. This way, we record it analog, in our case we record it to the Prism Sound, and we get the Prism Sound distorted ['visually'. So the inputs are distorted and the meter shows that it cliping but my ears don't listen distortion]. We get in truth high gain and with a sound that doesn’t sound compressed. AF: Yeah definitely, if you have more dynamics that’s better. Eisen: I hate compression. If I may stay clear from it, I prefer to refrain from the compression. Especially side chain compression. AF: It’s good to listen that because you know more and more people just compress and over-compress… Eisen: I don’t perceive why. They forget when it comes to the music. Where is the music? But then again, it’s a matter of taste. Everybody does what feels better to them. AF: So do you mix everything in Cubase? Eisen: Yes, we do, we mix everything in Cubase. We are actually disseminating the channels on the RME AES32 mixer, so we do the sounding over there in a way. I think it sounds better, and then we record the two outputs to two inputs of another soundcard, the Prism Sound. AF: What are your preferent virtual synths? Eisen: I employed to say a large total of stuff but I think these days I think only Omnisphere. It’s perfectly awful and we also have Trilian, which is in truth in truth good. We purchased the whole Native Instruments pack for example, and I want to say Massive – it is an astounding synth, but it doesn’t work on Cubase properly. AF: You mean it crashes? Eisen: Always crashes. Massive, now and again when we actually want to have a dissimilar sound, we use Massive on another computers stand alone, sadly. I think these are the best VSTs. I don’t think there is anything else that may compare to the Spectrasonics stuff, in terms of everything. And we also have for strings the Vienna Symphonic Library, the plug-in VSL. AF: In one of your songs there is a violin, playing in truth like a violin, is that what you use? Eisen: Yes. This is what we use. AF: I thought it was a real one. Eisen: It’s costly shit, the Vienna, genuinely expensive, but not one thing compares to it. It sounds so realistic. And if you write it in the right way, it’s unbelievable. The Vienna is amazing. Even the built in Cubase 5 plug-ins are sounding genuinely good. The synths themselves, the sound quality is good. AF: Now what regarding the hardware gear you use largely when you play live? Eisen: Well it’s very simple. As a synth, I use only the Motif XS6. Controlling it with the Edirol PCR-800. It’s finelooking good. I control the cutoff with the Boss Volume pedal. For a mixer we use the Yamaha 01V96 version 2. Which is great, in the live show we just push the button and 99% of the soundcheck is done. The only thing I have left to do is just final EQ for the system, and that’s it. AF: Very practical. Eisen: I am also controlling the mixer from my midi controller from the Edirol keyboard. So if I need more guitars I don’t need to approach the mixer, I just push more guitars…I have everything controlled from the keyboard. Everything is actually quick in the live show, because I am doing the mixing for the live. AF: And on the computer part you never had any crashes while playing live? Eisen: We did a long time ago because of our mistakes. We had the stupidity having by fault an anti-virus open and it decisive to look for an update or something. Today we have a backup for everything almost. But we don’t have crashes for a good deal of years now luckily. AF: A few minutes ago we were talking regarding your mixes. They are always very ‘precise’, with no redundancies on the spectrum, even when you have huge synths playing. For example, I read in your forum that you said “the hard work is to mix things right and remove not wanted frequencies”. Would you reduce the spectrum of most of your instruments when mixing to reach this goal? Eisen: I high-filter everything except the bass and the kick drum. Actually I made a plug-in in Reaktor that solved the issue of kick and bass. I basically made the side chain EQ in a way. Every time there is a kick, there is a high-pass filter on the bass line for example. Every time the kick plays, the bass line has a high-pass. I applied to do it manually. Then I said, you recognise what, let’s do it in Reaktor, it’s finelooking easy. AF: It’s in truth working well. The bass and drums are actually always very precise. Eisen: You just clean the mix. Whenever the kick doesn’t play, it still sounds fat. Especially if you always want to have bass playing on the kick at the same time. That’s the greatest problem – you just find yourself doing a bass line that you don’t in truth want. Bassline without the ones on the kick. For me at least, we solved this issue for Infected. Except that, I low cut everything that doesn’t need bass, unless it’s a break, and in the break you may fetch back all the bass. But when the kick comes, I think most of the mix sounds cleaner when you cut at least 100-120 Hz. Much clearer. There are so a good deal of proficiencies that I use – stereo synth, so that the synth will sound more stereo. I am doing a technique of double tracking like on guitar. Basically let’s say I have a simple bass line. So I play a little bit with the cutoff, I play a little bit with the attack, with the decay, a little bit with the release of the sound. I am doing a long session that I am playing with it. Like let’s say, 8 bars, ok. And then from these 8 bars I export the 8 bars to an audio file, and then I split the 8 bars to 4 and 4. The primary 4 I put on the left channel, and second 4 I put on the right channel. And then I have this little motion in the bass line, and I recorded the motion manually so it’s not so precise. The left channel is not precisely as the right channel and then it sounds more stereo without any effect. AF: Like a chorus. Eisen: Yeah like a chorus. But if you wanted to sound more like a chorus you play likewise with the tune, the off-tune. AF: This sounds like you in truth have two players at the same time. Eisen: Yeah. It sounds like two players at the same time. You don’t in truth recognise what is going on, but it sounds more stereo and more fat in a way. So I am doing it closely for everything, to be honest. Almost any end that we do – we just record a longer version, then we cut it in the middle. The initial part we put left, the second part right, and that’s it. AF: Very interesting for our readers, these kinds of tricks. Eisen: I have so many, I don’t recognise where to start, I don’t want to bore you to death. AF: I won’t be bored even if we talk all day.;-) Part 3: The Legend of the Black Shawarma Eisen: Basically what I do in a great deal of things is, I take, let’s say, one note from the guitar portion and I just employ an effect on it. This pitch shift if I am not wrong is Soundforge because I hate the pitch shift on Cubase. So I take it to Soundforge just to pitch shift and I paint how low I want the pitch shift to go. It’s in truth easy on Soundforge to do that. And then I take this part of the wave and fetch it back in time, and just put it in this second. If I want a trigger, I just mark a little part, I loop the little trigger, it may be a few samples even. I try to stay clear from clicks when I’m doing it, looking for zero crossing. Then I just do the trigger and put it in the right time. AF: What delay do you use? It sounds like a delay with a filter on it, it’s a plug-in? Eisen: Actually it’s a delay that I made. AF: I have the Lexicon MPX-1 and it reminds me of one of the effects on it. It’s actually nice. To mix a filter on the delay. Eisen: It’s an 8 tap delay on it, and on each tap there you may add any effect that you want. AF: On the guitar, just after the intro, you have an amp effect. You said you are not using guitar amps. Eisen: No. Not at all. AF: So the effects that you are using… Eisen: On this specific guitar, it’s fundamentally going to the Avalon clean and from the Avalon it in truth goes to an LA2A, a real one, a little bit compression. I think for highs, to make the guitar brighter, I use the Pultec UAD plug-in. I love the high frequencies in the Pultec. Usually I just choose the most eminent settings. AF: On Sa’eed, the beginning percussion parts, is it your drummer who is playing? Eisen: The percussions here are genuinely just tapping on an acoustic guitar. AF: Really? Eisen: Yeah with the fingers, just tapping on the body of the guitar and using the same stereo technique that we talked in regards to before. The percussion of the whole thing is using an acoustic guitar, just drumming on the guitar. It sounded beauteous cool. We didn’t suppose to use it. I don’t know how it sounded like that. We just tried it, and the mic was actually close to the tapping, and it sounds like that. AF: Sometimes you have surprises. Eisen: Always good stuff is by surprise. AF: At 1:00 you have a heap of effect on the voice. How do you make this kind of sound on the voice? Eisen: Basically, we cut each syllable of the word. Let’s say “I feel ashamed”, we cut the “I” and then in the word “feel” we just cut the “f”, the “ee”, and then the “l”. For example, only the “ee” of the “feel” we trigger that one. A in truth little trigger until we get the pitch, the note that we want. AF: Yes. Because when you do a loop on it makes particular harmonics. [Editor's Note: the sound is tuned depending on the length of the loop: frequency (in Hz) = 1 / amount of time of the loop (in seconds) - example: To reach a "A", your loop has to be a multiple of 2.2727 milliseconds] Eisen: Yeah. When it’s in truth short you get these particular harmonics. So you need to know the length of the loop that you are doing until you get the right pitch. Basically we do this on each syllable. On “ashamed” there are a lot of them. Usually, on the “s”, the “t” and the “d”, the beginnings of words, the consonants, we keep, we don’t touch them, and only harmonics sound we trigger. It takes a lot of time. AF: I thought it was a plug-in that was doing that. So you are doing that manually. Eisen: I hope there is a plug-in. Please give it to me. This is what we do. We did it a long time ago on a track called I Wish. This was the basi time we tried doing it – on the album Converting Vegetarians. We did it here again, but only divergence is that we put this one through a little distortion. We in truth did it because we didn’t have the time to remove all the clicks. We were lazy. When you sample a voice with clicks through distortion, it doesn’t sound like with clicks anymore. AF: You recognise Depeche Mode, right? Do you feel some cross influence sometimes? Eisen: Of course. Listen, we are huge Depeche Mode fans. We are very influenced by them. Even from Cities of the Future. It’s very, umm, attempting to be Depeche Mode in a way. Sadly we are far from that. AF: It’s actually creative, very different, but we may feel the influence somehow. Eisen: We like the chord changes of Depeche Mode, and also the way they do stuff is in truth distinctive and nice. So we undertake to do it in our own way but evidently every one may listen that it’s, you know, stolen from Depeche Mode. AF: Not stolen but influenced. Now on Project 100, there is a very nice Rhodes piano. Is it a plug-in that you are using? Eisen: No. It’s just the Motif XS. AF: And do you play any specific effect on it? Like an AM/FM modulator on it? Eisen: There is a fast LFO, I think the LFO is on the panning, if I am not wrong. AF: OK so once again it is manual work on the sound, as opposed to a preset. On [the song] Franks, in the beginning there are a lot of genuinely cool chords, like a heap of mean EQ and numerous overdrive. So once again, what instrument and what effect do you use? Eisen: I think it’s also the Motif XS going through distortion. This distortion is not that great. Actually it’s with the Cubase amp simulator. I added this onto the Motif sound, but I don’t do not forget what style of sound it is. AF: The huge thing in this record is your collaborations with Jonathan Davis, Perry Farrell and the Doors. Is this something that you’ve wanted to do for a long time, collaborate with other artists? And what was their contribution? Eisen: We may get started with the Doors. It was the Doors track that Warner Brothers requested us to remix. They did a remix CD for galore Doors tracks, and fundamentally we got approved to use it in our album – The Riders on the Storm. We got initial channels from the Doors which was genuinely stimulating to get all these cool recordings, which sounded beauteous good I ought to say. This was the easiest one because it was pre-recorded so we didn’t in truth collaborate. With Jonathan Davis from Korn, in the beginning we asked him which song he wanted to sing. He chose Killing Time in the beginning. He came to the studio and we said, ‘do you mind attempting Smashing the Opponent because we think it fits more to your style’. And he said ‘sure’. He didn’t exercise it, but we just printed the lyrics, he gave it a shot, and I think not more than one hour recording and it was done, the vocals. AF: So basically, the lyrics and the melody lines were written and he just performed them? Eisen: Yeah. Everything was written before. He just came and performed the vocals. Same for Jane’s Addiction singer, Perry Farrell. We asked him if he minds doing Killing Time, and he liked it. With him we did two dissimilar sessions. We troubled him twice. Actually, he knows us for a long time. He has Classical Mushroom EP and The Gathering, which was very weird for us. Like, why do you have these albums? It was finelooking fun. Our move to Los Angeles was the move to make collaborations with people. In Israel we were pretty fixed to Israeli artists, which I have not one thing against. But it’s fixed to Hebrew mainly. We have dreams, as kids, you want to work with big artists, and you never believe that you will be competent to do, so we said let’s try. We almost got Dave Ghan from Depeche Mode singing, but at the end it didn’t happen. Hopefully, it will take place with Dave in the next album. AF: Last question when it comes to your lyrics from [the track] “The Legend of the Black Shawarma”, they are very positive and they are closely sending a message but perchance with a little bit of a warning. I am assuming these are not totally random lyrics, is this something that you’ve realized with time and now you wish to part with your listeners? Eisen: When we started doing lyrics, we said we will write when it comes to everything except when it comes to love. Because, it’s not that we have anything versus love, but each song is when it comes to love. So we said everything but love, which was not so hard. And tardily it became the Duvdev road, most of the lyrics. He came into the studio with closely all of the lyrics and perhaps I didn’t like one or two words. Duvdev is a gorgeous crazy guy. He has a large total of weird ideas. Lots of them we can not even write about. We undertake to write stuff with less meaning, that will open humans to think when it comes to stuff. Or we write very un-serious lyrics that it’s just private jokes amidst us and our friends. So please don’t take our lyrics seriously. AF: So you mean that actually you don’t want to convert vegetarians for real? Eisen: Why not? No, I’m just kidding… Everything is just funny, don’t take it too seriously. Converting vegetarians, if there is a meaning it’s largely meaning: convert yourself from listening to regular music and be open to listen to other kinds of music. Most helpful customer reviews 9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. |
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